Die Erfahrung mit lebensgroßen Modellen im Entwurfsprozess

Italian architect Umberto Riva has often expressed his secret wish to be allowed to build a former project, to experience it and to demolish it in order to know its implicit and unavoidable limits and to re-design and to re-build it with a higher acknowledge. When working back on Monsieur La Roche’s picture gallery as well as Villa Stein de Monzie, Le Corbusier considered them as laboratories to perfect his interior design solutions. But the opportunity to experience a space before transforming it is for few architects. Such a rare privileged condition is partially achieved by an architect’s direct engaging in the building phases like in the common practice of Adolf Loos but it is slightly different. History of architecture might be told as a continuous research for the most exhaustive and involving envisioning tool, able both to give back the artist the full knowledge of the actual spatial condition of his own design and the client a heartening and answering image of his (money) endeavor. The drawings hardly may achieve such a sophisticated aim so may the scaled models. Sometimes big doubts can be solved only with big models. Michelangelo had an education as a sculptor and transferred his habit to full-scale bozzetti into the architectural design process, like in the competition for the crown of the Farnese Palace in Rome. Bernini – a sculptor himself - used full-scale models in several occasions to please his Popes, as in the Baldacchino, in Pantheon bell towers or in Saint Peter’s square, where he tried seven different solutions of the basic column made in wood and colored plaster. Bauer has defined Bernini’s procedure as a “direct forming” of building by gradual approximations of dimension and shape, necessary to improve the light effects and to fight the optical illusions of the far distance view. The XVIII century English gardeners focused on human vision in movement and conceived the garden as a path linking together a number of three-dimensional pictures made of vegetal materials. They conceptually shifted the design matrix from the horizontal plane to the vertical plane of elevation and they filled their manuals with procedures and suggestions to foresee their design with poor materials. The Marquise de Girardin, patron of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, suggested to build temporary full-scale model made of wooden rods and white clothes to quickly simulate trees foliage and water surfaces. In 1912 Mies van de Rohe adopted quite the same procedure and materials when Madame Kröller-Müller asked for a model to understand and evaluate his proposal for a large country villa but his effort was useless and the project was assigned to other architects. This last episode confirms us that a too faithful and full-scale model seems to exalt the problems more than the opportunities: clients are generally deluded by its experience but it can be very useful to architects, even when diverging from its original target. Koolhaas has supposed such an experience lead Mies to a brand, new range of suggestions and solutions which can be found in the Twenties’ works. Although rarely used, partial or total full-scale models are mainly built either to study elements and structures to be assembled or to involve and persuade people and public opinion in large projects development, but today the rapid prototyping techniques are changing this habit and allowing more and more designers to touch and move in the air their own formal ideas. Moreover, we must not ignore the knowledge acquired by actually building even a small element of a project. This paper focuses on the role full-scale models can have in the design process in virtue of the tactile and kinesthetic experience of space they offer to architects, with a special attention to their practice inside Steven Holl Architects design process.